domain:imgur.com
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
What a coincidence: I just read John Williams' "Augustus" and I was also scratching my head over what "the Octavian strategy" meant here.
gattsuru
2hr ago
... it's funny seeing the well-funded national org use worse surveys than I, a rando, threw at amadan offhandedly; it's funnier that they can't spend five minutes on tumblr to actually get a good summary of what Luigi fandom looks like.
(tbf, we are talking tumblr or instagram or tiktok or discord or a punk meatspace group)
The cynical answer is that the NCRI, specifically, is not some neutral true-seeking organization anymore than the Princeton Gerrymandering Project was. They were founded in 2018 as part of an effort to fight the alt-right, and came to national attention after a series of reports in that started with Boogaloo panicking ("this, like turning off the transponders on 9/11, enables the extremists to hide in plain sight, disappearing into the clutter of innocent messages, other data points"). The org pulls in increasing amounts per year (1.45m in 2023) and lists its address as an office park that (at ~5k/year rent) is probably little more than a PO box -- I can't say for sure that they're a cutout for another org to whitewash funding the group, because they fall under the threshold that breaks down how their income works, but there's not-subtle hints pointing that direction.
Yes, they're also probably just left-leaners given that they're pulled from the left side (Princeton, Rutgers) of academia to start with, but they're were built from the ground up to find specific enemies. It's certainly possible that they're trying to pander to Trump, or suddenly reveling in their newfound freedom to see the nose in front of their face, but there's a bit of a blander option: they think these specific groups are in their list of enemies to be targeted, too, and they want to shape how that discussion goes so the people they don't consider enemies are well outside of it. Beware outgroup homogenity bias.
That's why they're not doing a retrospective and suddenly finding any of the literally years of punch nazi discourse, that's why there's no comment on a Certain Topic That's Supported In Princeton, that's why their list of incidents is so short and circumscribed, that's why they can only model left-wing violence as authoritarianism, that's why their 'left-wing' authoritarianism is so obviously post-hoc and cumbersome (antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship aren't just awkward mirrors to their 'right-wing' counterparts, they're not even accurate names to their own descriptions).
Compare ProPublica writing a big story on H1-B abuse without using the word 'fraud' a single time.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
So I am pretty confident that he wouldn't end up like MAGA.
Could you elaborate on the specific features of MAGA that that you believe would preclude his approval?
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
They did see that, though? I'm not sure what world you live in if you think Chesterton wasn't living through the decline and destabilisation of the systems that he thought were essential for civilised society. He explicitly thinks English society is increasingly run by a cabal of vicious, anti-human elites and is therefore sinking back into barbarism.
So I am pretty confident that he wouldn't end up like MAGA.
He did get desperate a few times - I believe he once visited Italy and said nice things about Mussolini - but on the whole, I don't see the resemblance.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
But now you have zoomer progressive who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.
As I mentioned down thread, I live near a university. I frequently encounter protests for or against the ${CURRENT_THING} whenever I have to go into town.
One of the most fascinating protest signs that I ever saw simply said LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO in all-caps sharpie. To this day, I'm not even sure they were protesting.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
Uh, could you repeat the question please?
I think a contributing factor is also that a new generation has grown up steeped in progressive rhetoric but that isn’t “in on the joke”. Millennial and Baby Boomer progressives knew on some level that this was all just a rhetorical device for advancing the Democratic Party’s electoral interest. Trans women weren’t actually women. We aren’t actually planning to have a real no-joke, violent communist Revolution and put the CEOs up against the wall. We shouldn’t actually try to drive Israel into the sea because the State Department wouldn’t like that, even if there is no logical way to justify its existence under the ideological creed we loudly profess. But now you have zoomer progressives who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.
kky
2hr ago
For posts like this, in the future, could you indicate who you’re linking at the start? I assume it’s the Paper of Record, but my phone struggles to load the archive link and it’s not immediately clear otherwise.
Just watched Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock on Netflix, widely considered one of the best movies of all time (#42 in the AFI's 100, #48 in the 10th Anniversary Edition, included in Roger Ebert's Great Movies series). Wonderful time-capsule of 50's urban life; men walk around in suits and ties, MC is not allowed to have his lady friend stay the night in his apartment, etc. Loved the non-verbal storytelling, like a shot of the thermostat to show the movie takes place during a heat wave or panning over photos of a car crash to establish MC got his leg hurt covering an auto race. Great dynamic between MC and FMC; she wants commitment, but he feels they won't work out together; he's in a wheelchair, so she has to be his legs and physically investigate the case. The breakfast scene was hilarious, as was much of the dialogue. Highly recommended.
Incidentally, Rear Window is a common Whole-Plot Reference Stock Parody, so I watched at least two different Rear Window homages as a kid (Flintstones and Rocko's Modern Life) before I ever got the chance to watch the original as an adult
roystgnr
2hr ago
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
What could some jerks with trucks, consumer goods, and explosives do against, to pick a random example, a fleet of Tupolev bombers, right?
In theory I agree with you 100%, at least now that a serious military needs to have nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
In practice, Suez canal traffic was still down nearly 70% from 2023 Q1 to 2025 Q1, after third-world terrorist separatists took 10% of world trade hostage, because it took more than a year for a serious military to bomb them into agreeing to (not even a surrender!) a ceasefire. I do feel confused that the march of technology hasn't yet brought us to an era in which leading military superpowers can successfully pacify places like Afghanistan, with much less than a couple decades and a couple trillion dollars of effort, but here we are.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2hr ago
There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this. I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016. And so Trump blindsided him.
And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society. Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest. And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change. And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so. And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down. A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too. And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is! We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too! Show up at the polls and organize! But I mean, what can you do? Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?" And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies. They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).
But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change. Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric. And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position). And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that. Trump loves chaos. He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.
In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out. And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind. They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves. So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked. And so that's grown and grown...
But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue. And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them. So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be. And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".
oats_son
3hr ago
I might agree with you on the whole, but I have to wonder if this whole gun debacle is just how lawyers work.
Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell may both have been written precisely enough to avoid people trying to find holes to poke, whereas all these hyper specific laws around banning inanimate objects with a million different variations come pre-loaded with holes in them. Ban one, another one that's basically the same but with some small change comes into effect because millions of different variations in a field where no one drafting the laws actually knows anything. I don't see anyone wiggling out of Dobbs.
Granted, courts purposely seeing right past obvious constitutionality is pretty obvious at times, especially when they write about the "Aloha Spirit" in their rulings. We're likely doomed either way, but I wonder why it happens more to guns than it does to other red tribe endeavors.
This is the new game? Is it because Trump is in the White House again, so academia has to go back to pretending to be "politically neutral?" "We're all good classical liberals, boss, honest! No radicals here, no sir.
I live near a university, and what I'm seeing among the faculty is that some of them, at least, look enough like Kulaks and traitors to Glorious Revolution that they're starting to get a little afraid.
Once it happens, it seems like they go one of two directions.
The first is they quadruple down on all the various shibboleths that show they're One Of The Good Ones - their Tesla sports a new "I bought it before Elon went nuts" bumper sticker. Their yard grows another "In this house we believe sign". The pride flag flaps in the wind year round. Each step gets more ostentatious and, to me, increasingly nervous.
The second is that they start doing more "right wing" things and integrate with those who they once called enemies when conversing with their former peers. They hit the range. They go to church. They visit the redneck bar and say "I don't know if I like Trump but this shit they're doing at my kid's school is getting out of hand." Like a prisoner hoping the Nazi biker gang will keep the Crips from raping him straight into the hospital, they observe just enough of the norms to keep them in the good graces of their new group.
Watching the dichotomy is interesting, and I can usually predict which way a given staff or faculty member is going to land.
AugustDeRosa
3hr ago
I've lurked the Motte in its various incarnations over the past however many years and have felt strongly about many of the things posted, however, I have never felt any strong enough need to post that I thought it necessary to make an account - until your description of 'The Octavian Strategy'.
What would this strategy have to do with Octavian? Octavian was a complete nobody politically until Caesar died, at which point, Caesar certainly wasn't "backseat driving", because Caesar was dead. There was absolutely no sense that people 'didn't care' about Octavian because they thought Caesar was in control, since, as mentioned, he was dead, and many of the key Caesarians had either taken part in the assassination conspiracy or ended up as Octavian's opponents, so they also weren't in control.
Or are you saying that it's the 'Octavian strategy' just because Donald Junior bears his father's name, in the same way Octavian was given Caesar's name by virtue of his adoption? Sure, I guess, but it's far more accurate to describe this strategy as literally any other political dynasty that isn't Caesar's, given that "son takes power after his father dies / exits the scene" is an incredibly common historical occurrence, and again, your primary point is that the father is still in the driver's seat, which definitely doesn't apply to Octavian.
And that's not even getting onto the Marcus Agrippa comparison. Agrippa had very little to do with Caesar, and was incredibly close to Octavian throughout his life. That does not map whatsoever onto Vance and Don Junior. I don't even understand what you're trying to imply with that.
I know some might view this as nitpicky or irrelevant but I honestly can't think of a less apt historical comparison I've seen here, ever, and I've seen some bad ones. Trying to just hamfistedly map scenarios onto what you think happened in Rome just leads to very bad conclusions, since you're evaluating strategy based on outcomes that never happened.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
What's the link to the source code? At the very least, I could make the approve link big and red.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3hr ago
So, this was an interesting read...
Left-wing violence is being normalized
I doubt many people here will find the core assertion even a tiny bit surprising; we were just talking about it, kinda, last month. What I found interesting was the, uh... I'm not sure what to call it. The rhetoric of realization, maybe? The opening line:
Something has changed in America’s psyche. Violence has become more acceptable.
I immediately found myself doing the DiCaprio squint and mouthing the words "fiery but mostly peaceful", but I read on. The meat:
Well, after working through a heap of survey data and social media language trends, we’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society. The NCRI has uncovered more than just an online ecosystem of unsettling ideas. What we’re seeing is the rise and proliferation of assassination culture on the internet. It’s more than just a collection of jokes, symbols and memes. It’s an entirely new subculture for incubating radical and subversive ideas that are anathema to the things America has historically stood for.
Over the past several decades we have assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right, and they often have. What we never expected to see was the enormous growth in similar calls emerging from the mainstream left. We undertook a nationwide survey to understand it better and discovered that a breathtaking half of those who identified as politically left-wing agreed that the murder of public figures could be at least somewhat justified. What’s more, 56 percent of them agreed that there could be some justification for killing Trump. Just under half agreed that the same could be said about the fate of Musk. Tesla dealerships, too, merit at least some destruction, according to 59 percent of those surveyed.
You don't say!
If you want to understand America today, the most compelling explanations revolve around a cluster of personality characteristics called authoritarianism. There are two kinds: a right-wing kind and a left-wing kind. Many mainstream academics say that all our present political instability revolves around a critical mass of people amenable to behaviors linked with the right-wing type. . . .
Yet it runs against common sense to imagine only right-wing people can act pathologically when most of the postwar world lived, for a while, under the intensely authoritarian – and quasi-genocidal – domination of communist regimes. And very few of us can shake the intuition that the intense “woke” energy which has so permeated American culture over the past decade shares these hallmarks of authoritarian tyranny.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that there has been a kind of intellectual embargo on saying so lately, because most explanations coming from mainstream US academia about cultural politics have fixated on the conservative version. The godfather of right-wing authoritarianism theory, the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, labeled the left-wing variety as nothing more than a “Loch Ness Monster”: it doesn’t actually exist.
And people believed that! Somehow. Bob was the expert, after all. He's an expert, Bob! An expert! (Well, he was; Altemeyer died last year, too early to witness Trump's second inauguration.) Also, how does Horder know I'm not surprised to "learn" that there has been an "intellectual embargo on saying so lately?" He seems to be suggesting that it will not surprise the reader to learn that his surprising new discovery is in no way surprising to anyone who isn't a shameless partisan. How is that supposed to work, exactly?
Newer thinkers, however, have started to change their minds. Academics have begun work on a new framework that describes an emergent left-wing authoritarianism.
The article details the framework, which is basically a mirror of the extant right-wing framework (conventionalism -> anticonventionalism, aggression -> antihierarchical aggression, submission -> censorship). On one hand, I think the author is correct. On the other, I guess I'm wondering if I can get a senior fellowship at Princeton for being several decades ahead of their best researchers on the idea that authoritarian leftism is actually a real thing. The whole tone of the piece is amazing to me. Max Horder comes off as an affable buffoon; "we discovered the Loch Ness monster, guys! What a shock!"
It's a move in the direction. I don't have any serious complaints about the proposed framework. But really. Really. This is the new game? Is it because Trump is in the White House again, so academia has to go back to pretending to be "politically neutral?" "We're all good classical liberals, boss, honest! No radicals here, no sir." Or am I too cynical? Maybe it's more like--there really was an intellectual embargo, the Trump administration has directly or indirectly lifted that embargo, so all the good scholarship is creeping out into the sun. In which case, will academics admit that? Maybe send Trump a thank-you card?
I won't hold my breath.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
There are no tribes, just some really loud megaphones (currently mostly in the media) and a lot of people dancing to their tune. Change the megaphones and the people will follow, both red and blue.
It is evident that Blue Tribe had uncontested control of a supermajority of the "megaphone" for a very long time, and now this control is almost entirely gone. If there are only megaphones and people dancing to their tune, how did this occur?
At a minimum, your account of the political process is missing the concept of policy starvation.
I understand that values-coherence is not maintainable in the long term. The nation long divided will unite, the nation long-united will divide. All works of the human mind and hand decay eventually. The fact remains that some of them decay like stone, and some decay like nitroglycerin.
Let us suppose I rigorously observe the forms and niceties. The other side flouts them. This is regrettable, but mistakes and friction are inevitable.
I continue to observe the forms and niceties. The other side continues to flout them. This happens repeatably, to the point that I can predict in advance with excellent accuracy where and when the flouting will occur, the specific mechanisms used to organize, implement, and protect it. This flouting constantly costs me value, and the value it costs me is increasing rapidly over time.
Your claim seems to be that the correct response is to grin and bear it, to accept that justice will never be done and that this is okay because mumble mumble.
There are contexts in which this is an answer I, personally, am willing to accept: "Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me?"
This is not an answer that you should rely on to maintain our current, observably-shaky condition of peace and plenty in the long term. Such reliance is extremely foolish and extremely dangerous. I invite you to contemplate the political history of the phrase "no justice, no peace", and to examine its prominence in the political landscape. Examine the position of John Brown within our society and political mythos.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3hr ago
If you don't want unintended effects, don't train the thing on the whole of a culture you don't control. Calling it "rogue" is like calling a hammer evil because it hurt when you're hitting yourself with it. Stop hitting yourself.
I love this explanation, it's a great way to put it in perspective. I would also say that this -
To model it as having agency would imply the thing starting to do things on its own that aren't just emergent properties of what you're making it do.
Rules most people out of the agentic category. And that's why I say please and thanks to deepseek anyway.
MotteAnon12345
3hr ago
Somehow, I sort-of agree and mostly disagree with both of you.
First off, the vast majority of people believe what they're told to believe. The source can vary (based mostly on historically contingent details) but it's external nature does not.
So, when @FCfromSSC talks about tribes and irreconcilable differences, it feels rather silly to me. There are no tribes, just some really loud megaphones (currently mostly in the media) and a lot of people dancing to their tune. Change the megaphones and the people will follow, both red and blue.
And Secondly, the conflict isn't about some specific problem. It's not even about any specific values. It's about power! Ambitious unscrupulous person A needs a weapon against political opponent B. What is he to do?! In our current system, the answer is to accuse the person of some moral failing. If this exact same person was to be dropped into a corporation, they would play dumb office politics games (and maybe hopefully differentiate themselves through commercial achievements). If they were dropped into China? They'd sing the praises of the party and complain about how their opponents were letting the party down.
And ambitious people are simply a fact of life. With a few scruples and the right incentives, they can be quite beneficial! But not when their incentives are to shit on the moral commons in the pursuit of power.
The root problem here is democracy. It weakens central authority and makes power a free-for-all. The net results is that politics infects everything downstream (and everything is downstream of the sovereign).
@FCfromSSC, get rid of the blue tribe and you will find the red tribe splitting at the seams. And you won't like the results.
@WandererintheWilderness, get rid of this problem and another will be found in its place.
Wow, this is a fantastic summary I've been trying to write, but somehow way more concise. Reported as AAQC, thanks.
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